Page:The People of India — a series of photographic illustrations, with descriptive letterpress, of the races and tribes of Hindustan Vol 2.djvu/38

 MAGARS.

HE Magars are a tribe of no very great magnitude, resident in Nipal. They are " unquestionably a people of this (the southern) side of the snows ( Himalayas), and their original country is Sikkkim, from which they were first driven est by the Lepchas across the Meehi and Konki rivers, and thence further west by the Limboos beyond the Arun and Doodkooshi. While in Sikkim they were not Hindoos; they ate fowls, pigs, and everything except the cow, from which I believe they abstained. They had no priests, or 'puja,' of any kind. Now, however, they have the Brahmins, and are, I believe, reckoned very good Hindoos in Nipal." (Ilan Sing, Dewan of Sikkim, in Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal., v. xi., p. 5.) They are largely enlisted into the Nipalese army, and are excellent soldiers, having formed a considerable portion of the Goorkha regiment enlisted by Sir C. Napier in 1850. Their attachment to the house of Goorkha is but recent, and of no extraordinary or intimate nature. "They have acquired the Khas language, though not to the oblivion of their own; and the Khas habits and sentiments, but with sundry reservations in favour of pristine liberty." They are divided into fifty-three different septs, or families.